Efficient and flexible: How Gomo transformed Centrica's eLearning
“If I look at how our designers felt pre-Gomo, compared to how they feel now, there’s been a huge growth of self-confidence. Team members were formerly responsible for any and all aspects of the course: Gomo has allowed designers to move into specialisms, as digital designers, instructional designers, media designers. It used to sometimes take weeks to get projects through the process—we can now turn a course around in a day.”
25,000+
learners
70%
of digital learning now built in-house
100
courses redesigned in Gomo
About Centrica
Centrica plc is an international energy services and solutions business, supplying electricity and gas to homes and businesses across the UK, Ireland, and North America. It is the largest supplier of gas to domestic customers in the United Kingdom, operating under the name British Gas in England and Wales, and Scottish Gas in Scotland. The organization employs over 25,000 people and supplies energy to over 26 million customer accounts.
The challenge: Bringing learning design for a 25,000+ audience in-house
Centrica has complex training requirements for its 25,000+ learners as well as global partners. The L&D department is responsible for the depth and breadth of learning across the entire organization globally. It supplies soft skills training, as well as business-critical training for field engineers, gas apprentices, call-center agents, and workers at head office.
These employee groups naturally require different course content, and there are different local brands to also account for. There’s also a clear desktop/mobile split between office workers and engineers in the field that all learning solutions would need to accommodate.
Centrica’s L&D Solutions team required an efficient, scalable tool that could support their plans to build an in-house design team. These plans were both modeled on and intended to replace the external design teams they were previously reliant on. There’s an organizational need to record and collect subject matter expertise and create a steady pipeline of digital learning content with a consistent, fresh look and feel.
“The 2020 pandemic was naturally a challenging time—the first couple of weeks were crucial: overnight our call-centers and head-office workers went fully remote. If we didn’t have Gomo, we wouldn’t have been able to deploy our comms and learning at the pace that we did. Gomo enabled us to support our people in a moment of need with new COVID-specific eLearning courses.”
The solution: From pilot to full eLearning overhaul in just a year
The company’s new Director of Learning & Development had championed the use of Gomo in her previous L&D role at a telecommunications company. Piloting an initial ‘proof of concept’ project with a compliance eLearning course and a Gomo-supplied custom theme, Centrica was able to bring the course rebrand in-house, saving tens of thousands of pounds.
Feedback on this pilot course was overwhelmingly positive, and a team of more than 15 users was quickly upskilled on using the authoring tool to revamp the existing course catalog. In the first year of using Gomo, thousands of pieces of material on the Centrica LMS were decommissioned and replaced by hundreds of pieces that were refined using the Gomo authoring tool, and built to serve the team’s new capability and job-role mapping.
Because Gomo is fully responsive, Centrica can distribute content through multiple channels, mainly their existing learning management system as well as on their intranet.
Gomo’s ease of use and robust collaborative features have helped to dramatically reduce turnaround times for the team. Centrica is a multi-layered organization and the ability to provide links and assign reviewer roles to many different stakeholders has proved invaluable.
The results: A commercial and creative success that keeps paying off
With the new Gomo-designed courses, Centrica is now creating 70% of digital learning in-house and outsourcing the remainder. Course completion rates have improved dramatically, from a full year to one quarter.
The business continues to save thousands of pounds by bringing learning in-house. Feedback has been excellent with learners ‘star rating’ the training content 4.7 out of 5. By December 2020, well-over 100 courses had been redesigned in Gomo, reducing the company’s reliance on external vendors for all learning content.
Centrica hasn’t finished innovating with Gomo. The L&D team plans to place the tool at the center of its upcoming user-generated content framework. It aims to offer Gomo (and guidance on how to get the most out of it) more widely in the business in order to capture the vast amount of expertise among long-tenured employees in easily-digestible digital form.
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